document compatibility

As I slowly make my way to apple-land and buy my Mini (after I find some way to explain and justify this to my wife ... hooo boy) - what is the story about being able to create and share documents that are compatible to (readable) by MS Word and Excel.

Will still need to send - recieve files from family and friends who have PCs

Whats the hassle factor on this and how well does it really work - will I need to buy additional SW

You can get MS Office for the Mac, which will solve your problem. Alternatively you could use Pages (not free), OpenOffice (free), or NeoOffice (free). But conversion to and from Word and Excel is not perfect. (Note: Pages wont open Excel files, just Word files.)

I run MS Office 2004 for Mac and I have no compatibility issues with family or work where I also use Office for Windows. I'd highly recommend getting Office if you need rock solid compatibility.

Office on the Mac in some ways is actually better than on PC.

Kokopelli smacked that one down, dead on. You can open word files in Textedit, too. I mean, it's not great, but it can be done. I recomend office for mac, 'cause it works perfectly and is really similar to office for windows (except some of the buttons are a little different and not the same place), but everything opens well in it.
I have heard good things of OpenOffice, though I've never used it...Either way, you might as well try out the free ones and then buy what you need if you have to.
Good luck changing your wife's mind.

The easiest way is just to get Office:mac. (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/). It looks, feels, and smells (hold your nose) just like Microsoft Office, because it is. But it's $150 (if you have any connection to an educational institution--including a kid in school.) or more.

OpenOffice/NeoOffice are free, but are pretty clunky to use. Compatibility is good; most people won't have any issues, but occasionally things don't translate properly.

AppleWorks is easy to use, but doesn't have as many features as Office or OpenOffice. Compatibility is not as good as OpenOffice, either.

Open Office or NeoOfficeJ both work quite well for the average person who just needs to view and send word format files. Compatability with word and Excel is quite good with Open Office and they are improving it more and more with each update, it should give you no problems unless you have to do real heavy duty stuff and both programs are free. If you don't mind making good ol bill even richer then Ms Office should give you full compatability.

I would certainly recommend going with the free programs first to see if they will do the job for you before spending big bucks.

http://www.openoffice.org

You will also need to download X11 for the mac, also free to use with Open Office, you won't need it for NeoOfficeJ as it is a native OS X program.

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php